My Mother Told Stories Through Hmong Embroidery, I Use the Pen

Naturally, the first person I wrote about was my mother.

The tapestry had always traveled with our family, no matter where we moved.

It was a simple design: cornflower blue fabric creased over neat triangles of cotton muslin the same colorless hue as the tule fog creeping through California’s Central Valley winters. This geometric border framed a fantastical scene featuring exotic creatures worshipping at the foot of a mother tree festooned in crimson peonies, parrots, and peacocks. Frogs and golden carp splashed in a pond tangled with pink lotuses. As a toddler, my mother held me to this flower cloth, her paj ntaub, so I could inspect these satin-stitched silhouettes with my plump palms. “Tiger,” my mother said. Monkey. Deer. Boar. Pheasant. Dragon. As I grew older, I pointed to the long-necked gray beast and said, “That’s a brontosaurus, not a dragon.” My mother told me that she had never heard of this word before: dinosaur.

“Was this based on a real place?” I asked her. My mother said that she wasn’t sure, because it had been described to her in a story from her own mother, and the mothers before that one too. So, surely, it must have been real once. “But how do you know if you’ve repeated the story wrong?” I asked. “And how can you not know the difference between a dragon and a dinosaur?”

My mother replied that some truths appeared so only because they were repeated, and that there were simply two kinds of truth in the world: one spoken aloud, and the other caged to the heart. That a story existed simply for the pleasure of being told. And that perhaps the words for dragon and dinosaur described, in fact, the very same thing.

*

The legend goes that the Hmong once had a precious scroll containing their entire history, from the creation of the world by Butterfly Mother, the dragon who hatched from a single egg, to accounts of how they were chased by the Chinese emperors to the southern hinterlands. This scroll survived each generation’s migration until a terrible famine swept through their kingdom and they were forced to eat their stories or starve to death. Or the book had been seized by Qing soldiers and burned to force the Hmong to erase their own identity. Or was it that the book had gotten wet while crossing the Red River into Vietnam and was chewed by water buffalo while drying in the sun, then devoured by rats the following night? Regardless, the Hmong did not have a written language until the 1950s, so daughters were taught by their mothers how to retell these stories of heroes and kings through their paj ntaub, or flower cloths, so that the knowledge remained secret, and, thus, the Hmong were always clever in their hearts.

This wordless method of mythmaking was easy to transmit from mothers to daughters. Many Hmong women traded their voices for thread, and their quiet toiling became a measure of compliance. Obedient daughters were efficient body-machines; they became a means of reproducing Hmong culture through the creation of artifacts and heirs, although visual storytelling was deemed women’s work not worth a heroic retelling. The names of kings and war heroes lived on through stories, but every woman was simply named a man’s daughter, then wife, a mother and grandmother, then ghost. And if a woman never told her own story, who would remember her name? How could she prove that she had existed at all?

For hundreds of generations, a Hmong woman’s cultural heritage and clan identity depended on the quality of her handmade ceremonial costume, because every stitch represented a direct spiritual connection to her ancestors. This is why it is offensive to ask a traditional Hmong woman to sew ceremonial clothes for commercial sale. Why would she want to sell her body, her soul, and her ancestors? Better to create something to please herself first. Then, once she has outgrown the style or married, she can decide who will be the next owner—whether that is an antiquities collector, a fashion merchandiser, a curious tourist, a museum curator, or her daughters. It is her choice, alone, how she wants to be remembered through this self-portrait in thread.

This risk of spiritual transference did not apply to flower cloth tapestries: paj ntaub were first created by Hmong women in Ban Vinai refugee camp, Thailand, as a direct response to their displacement following the end of the Vietnam and Secret Wars in 1975. These embroideries were memorials to the pastoral paradises and ancestral Edens before civil wars ravaged their villages, and they were intended for export to American buyers. In Ban Vinai, Hmong were caged in together with other political refugees who had barely survived en route to the Mekong River. They were loaned children’s books in English to study, and many of those animals appeared in these flower cloths. And, for the first time, Hmong began to sew English words to narrate their harrowing journeys from Laos.

Their paj ntaub chronicled a desperate migration, and each stitch was a silent and unspeakable act. My mother’s tapestry of paradise was both a chronicle of her refugee journey as well as a secret wish for an impossible return.

*

One evening, when I was about seven years old, my mother pulled me aside after dinner and told me that it was time I learned how to become a woman. What she meant was that I would begin the arduous task of designing, sewing, and embroidering my wedding ceremonial clothes, under her careful instruction, over the next ten years.

Their paj ntaub chronicled a desperate migration, and each stitch was a silent and unspeakable act.

The sewing would be done in the early morning, before catching the school bus, and late at night after the homework and dishes were done. It didn’t matter if I was busy, my mother said, because embroidery was not something done in “free time” or a replacement for idle daydreams. It was a deliberate act of cultural preservation: how to sew, mend, and repair things that had been ripped apart or worn away by time, and an incontestable way of demonstrating a girl’s worth as a future wife, mother, and daughter-in-law.

Every lesson began the same, with my mother saying: “Do it exactly as I do.”

The first lesson: cross-stitch, the rote, pixelated hatching for beginners.

The second lesson: reverse appliqué, quilting a jigsaw of discarded fabric strips with hundreds of hidden seams.

The final lesson: batik and satin stitch, creating patterns with wax and thread that, when finished, look so complex that, from afar, at first, it looks like chaos.

And, in between all of this, my mother talked constantly about style, color, motifs, and themes, and she narrated the secret meaning sewn into her pillows on our couch.

“That is the story of how we came to Laos over a hundred years ago,” she said. Triangles were for mountains. Steps and rice seeds for the long migration to new lands. Smaller triangles: fish scales, magical protection from evil spirits. The elephant’s foot, a sign of longevity, wrapped around snail shells: the wish for a long and happy marriage. Inside that union, the spirits of the ancestors guarding the house at the center of the world.

*

Although I loved my mother’s stories during these embroidery lessons, I was a terrible student. I would string my needle too long, the thread bucking through the empty canvas until it knotted into great birds’ nests, and almost every stitch was uneven. I couldn’t follow a pattern. I counted wrong. I was distracted and impatient, or too ambitious and cocky, to take my time. I thought about how I’d rather be sitting on the cracked concrete parking block with Youa, the girl from the other side of the apartment complex, smelling her strawberry lip gloss and taking turns writing stories in her blank notebook with her unbroken crayons, still pristine in their paper jackets.

The needle bit my fingertip. I left a constellation of stars smeared across my needlework.

“Too soft, see?” my mother laughed. She held a needle against the tip of her index finger. It was sheathed in a helmet of callused skin. She pressed the needle into it, and the needle bowed. “You can only master the needle by being the stronger one.”

“Copy me,” my mother said, as if those two words would magically transform my body into hers.

I knew better than to tell my mother that I would rather have a callus on my middle finger, like Jo March, a pillow I grew like a pearl to rest my pen. I preferred the specificity of words, because I liked the idea of definitions caged between letters; I liked the idea of telling a story without bleeding. I found sisterhood in stories written by early Hmong American women like Mai Neng Moua and Ka Vang, and their words awakened within me the dream of a literary kinship—a wish for my own Eden.

I thought twice to ask my mother if she had ever loved someone so much that she thought about them all the time—before she was married. If she would have chosen to get married, if it had been a choice at all. And if I failed at doing this one thing for my mother, would she love me still? It felt dangerous to ask.

It was easier to just call it dumb, old-fashioned, and useless and stop doing it completely. That it was women’s work, and it no longer had a place in the modern world. And perhaps this meant there wasn’t a place for my mother in my own world. It was easier to say this than to admit that I was afraid of her rejecting me for being all wrong.

But then ten years passed and, instead of finishing my embroidery, I left for a university hundreds of miles away. This was unheard of: a Hmong woman did not leave her parents’ house unless she was getting married. And, even then, all that she was allowed to take with her were her ceremonial clothes.

I boxed up my entire side of the bedroom I shared with my sister. Like many college-bound Hmong daughters of my generation, the first ones to leave home in the family, my mother took my departure as a personal betrayal. When I saw the frayed threads of my unfinished needlepoint snipped to shreds in the trash, I knew that she had erased me.

I had become a strange girl to her. I was a stranger without a country now.

*

The Hmong word for flower, in my mother’s White dialect, is paj. In the Green dialect, it is paaj.

paj / paaj / ˈpä / noun:

1. a poem, i.e. paj huam (flower spreading)

2. a wise word, i.e. paj lug (flower word)

3. a story, i.e. paj ntaub (flower cloth)

4. a woman, e.g. my mother

In English, my mother’s name is spelled Pang, as in, a sudden and sharp pain; an uneasiness about one’s own wild desires; a gnawing emotion; a feeling that blossoms from the center of your heart.

*

Naturally, the first person I wrote about was my mother. Unsure of how to begin, I returned to her embroidery lessons: First, start with a simple design. Straight outlines are best. Next, tear big pieces into small strips. Cut them down to size, and lay out the design. Flip the edges under and use small stitches so they are not visible, at first. Repeat the pattern up to the edges. Apply pressure to remove the excess, thus revealing a clean and final design: a map of your truth.

When the essay was published, I mailed my mother a copy of the anthology with a note. I felt brave after mailing it; then I lay on the couch in my apartment for weeks awaiting her phone call. Months later, my mother called only to say that she disagreed with one small detail in the story and that, because I had written it in English, she didn’t understand most of it. Lastly, I had failed to reproduce the world exactly as she had remembered it. But writing a story from your life is a self-portrait, not a photograph.

My mother had asked me to copy her, to become her, years ago through her embroidery lessons. I understood then, perhaps intuitively, that she was trying to teach me her language for storytelling so that she could live on in my memory. We had tried to deliver each other from alienation, but we were undone by our dueling languages of choice. Like the threads of my mother’s flower cloths, the memories of the past would always entangle with the present. Sewing was simply a metaphor for writing. Writing and sewing described, in fact, the very same thing.

My mother understands this now, years later, and she recognizes her long shadow wreathing my writing the same way her own mother’s shadow envelopes her paj ntaub. She knows that when I share the language of flowers, I carry her name with me. When I tell a writer how to be clever in their heart, and speak desire, she lives there too.